But this "still small voice" of conscience and of reason, heard like a whisper from the mouths of Stephens in Georgia, and Magoffin in Kentucky, was drowned in the clamor and tumult of impassioned harangues and addresses, and the drumming and tramp of the "minute men" of South Carolina, and other military organizations, as they excitedly prepared throughout the South for the dread conflict at arms which they recklessly invited, and savagely welcomed. We have seen how President Andrew Jackson some thirty years before, had stamped out Nullification and Disunion in South Carolina, with an iron heel. But a weak and feeble old man--still suffering from the effects of the mysterious National Hotel poisoning--was now in the Executive Chair at the White House. Well-meaning, doubtless, and a Union man at heart, his enfeebled intellect was unable to see, and hold firm to, the only true course. He lacked clearness of perception, decision of character, and nerve. He knew Secession was wrong, but allowed himself to be persuaded that he had no Constitutional power to prevent it. He had surrounded himself in the Cabinet with such unbending adherents and tools of the Slave-Power, as Howell Cobb of Georgia, his Secretary of the Treasury, John B. Floyd of Virginia, as Secretary of War, Jacob Thompson of Mississippi, as Secretary of the Interior, and Isaac Toucy of Connecticut, as Secretary of the Navy, before whose malign influence the councils of Lewis Cass of Michigan, the Secretary of State, and other Union men, in and out of the Cabinet, were quite powerless.